Vixen in Velvet (7 page)

Crawford, one of Longmore’s longtime cronies, stood up. “I’ve got a limerick,” he said.

“If it brings a blush to any lady’s cheek, I’ll gladly throttle you,” Swanton said with a smile.

“Lord Swanton is so good,” Gladys said, her voice soft for once. “A
perfect
gentleman.”

“Who likes a ribald limerick as well as the next fellow,” Lisburne said. “If Crawford contrives to keep it clean, he’ll be the last one to do so. Fairfax, I suggest you take the ladies home while everybody’s still on good behavior.”

“You ever were high-handed,” Gladys said, in a magnificent example of pot calling kettle black. “The lecture isn’t over, and I’m sure we’re not ready to leave.”

“I’m sure we are,” Clara said. “My head is aching, not to mention my bottom. Val, do let us go.”

“Finally, after hours of misery and tragedy, we get a little good humor, and you want to leave,” Valentine said.

“Yes, before you’re tempted to challenge anybody else over a
poem
,” his sister said.

Meaning,
before Gladys could cause more trouble
, Lisburne thought. Leave it to her to turn a poetry lecture into a riot.

A riot the redheaded dressmaker had simply stood up and stopped with a handful of verses.

He left his cousins without ceremony. More of the families and groups of women were leaving now, delaying his progress to the place where he’d last seen Miss Noirot standing in all her swelling waves of green silk, reciting her amusing poem as cleverly as any comic actress.

When he got there, she was gone.

L
isburne pushed through the departing throng out into the street. Nary a glimpse of the green silk dress or cream-colored shawl did he get. By now, hackneys and private carriages had converged outside the entrance. Drivers swore, horses whinnied, harnesses jangled. The audience jabbered about the poetry and the near riot and the modiste in the dashing green dress.

And she’d slipped away. By now she was well on her way to St. James’s Street, Lisburne calculated.

He debated whether to go in that direction or let her be. It was late, and she would be working tomorrow. He would like to keep her up very late, but that wasn’t going to happen tonight. He’d made progress, but not enough. Pursuit this night would seem inconsiderate, and would undo what he’d achieved.

He returned to the hall and eventually ran Swanton to ground in one of the study rooms.

The poet was packing papers into a portfolio in a desperate fashion Lisburne recognized all too well.

“I see you made good your escape,” Lisburne said. “No girls clinging to your lapels or coattails.”

Swanton shoved a fistful of verse into the portfolio. “The damnable thing is, that fellow who was shouting? I couldn’t have agreed more. It’s rubbish!”

“It isn’t genius, but—”

“I should give it up tomorrow, but it’s like a cursed juggernaut,” Swanton went on. “And the devil of it is, we raised more money in this one evening than the Deaf and Dumb Asylum sponsors have raised in six months, according to Lady Gorrell.” He paused and looked up from crushing the poetry so many girls deemed so precious. “I saw you come in. With Miss Noirot.”

“She tried to get in earlier, but there wasn’t room. And so I took her to the circus instead.”

“The circus,” Swanton said.

“Astley’s,” Lisburne said. “She liked it. And as a consequence of her brain not being awash in grief and sorrow when we returned, she had the presence of mind to save your bacon.”

Swanton’s harassed expression smoothed into a smile. Then he laughed outright. “I remembered Miss Leonie, of course. From Paris. Who could forget those eyes? And the mysterious smile. But I’d forgotten how quick-witted she was. That was no small kindness she did, turning the audience’s mood.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Lisburne said. “Your poetical event wasn’t the only thing she saved. My cousin Gladys almost got Valentine in a duel.”

“Was your cousin Gladys the girl who gave the noisy fellow what for?” Swanton said. “I couldn’t see her. Men were standing up, and she was behind a pillar. And I couldn’t hear exactly what she said. But her voice is splendid! So melodious. A beautiful tone.”

Lisburne had never thought about Gladys’s voice. What she said was so provoking that one never noticed the vocal quality.

“Gladys is best heard at a distance,” he said. Lancashire, he thought, would be an acceptable distance at present.

Swanton closed the portfolio, his brow furrowed. “I’ll have to thank Miss Noirot. No, that’s insufficient. I need to find a way to return the favor. Without her, we should have had a debacle. That will teach me to let these things run on for so long. An hour, no more, in future.”

“But the girls want you to wax poetic all day and all night,” Lisburne said. “Half of them had to be dragged out of the lecture hall. If you give them only an hour, they’ll feel cheated.”

Swanton was still frowning. “Something to do with girls,” he said. “They take in charity cases or some such.”

“Who does?”

“Mesdames Noirot,” Swanton said. “Somebody told me. Did Miss Noirot mention it? Or was it Clevedon?”

“I know they took in a boy they found on the street,” Lisburne said.

Swanton nodded. “They do that sort of thing. I’d better look into it. I might be able to arrange an event to raise funds for them.” He grimaced. “But something less boring and . . . funereal.”

“I’ll look into it,” Lisburne said. “You’ve got your hands full, fending off all those innocent maidens whose adulation you’re not allowed to take advantage of. I’m the one with nothing to do.”

Chapter Four

SYMMETRICAL PERFECTION.—Mrs. N. GEARY, Court Stay-maker, 61 St James’s street, has the honour to announce to the Nobility and Gentry, that she has returned from the Continent, and has now (in addition to her celebrated newly-invented boned “Corset de toilette”) a STAY of the most novel and elegant shape ever manufactured . . . totally exterminating all that deadly pressure which has prevailed in all other Stays for the last 300 years . . . two guineas, ready money.

—
Court Journal
, 16 May 1835

Monday 13 July

A
steady routine is of first importance,” Leonie heard Matron explain. “Four hours of lessons, four hours of work, two hours for exercise and chores, half an hour for meals. As your lordship will see, the Milliners’ Society for the Education of Indigent Females is a modest enterprise. We can take in but a fraction of the girls who need us. But this is only the beginning. The Philanthropic Society, as you may be aware, began in a small house on Cambridge Heath and currently accommodates some two hundred children in Southwark. We, too, expect to grow, with the aid of charitable contributions as well as sales of our girls’ work, which I will be pleased to show you.”

From where Leonie stood in the corridor, no one in the workroom could see her. However, even with only a view of his back, she had no trouble recognizing the gentleman Matron was falling all over herself to accommodate.

Ah, yes, undoubtedly Lord Lisburne would like nothing better than to look at needlework.

Leonie debated for a moment. Not about what to do, because she was seldom at a loss in that regard. She did wonder, though, what had brought him here, of all places. She knew he was bored in London. He’d said he wanted to return to the Continent. In the meantime, he seemed interested merely in amusing himself, and she seemed to be one of the amusements.

Very well. Easy enough to turn that to her advantage. Business was business, he was rich, and he was
here
.

She swept through the open door.

“Thank you, Matron, for undertaking tour duty,” she said. “I know Monday is a busy day for you. I’ll continue Lord Lisburne’s tour, and you may return to your regular tasks.”

Matron relinquished Lord Lisburne with poorly concealed reluctance. And who could blame her? All that manly beauty. All that charm.

Unfortunately, all that manly beauty and charm must have turned Matron’s brain. Otherwise she’d have known better than to bring him into the workroom. Many of the girls in the bright, airy room stood on the brink of adolescence if not well in. Putting a stunning male aristocrat in front of them was asking for trouble.

Most sat in a stupor. Three had stuck themselves with their needles and were absently sucking the wounded fingers. Verity Sims had overturned her workbasket. Bridget Coppy was sewing to her dress sleeve the apron she was making.

They’d be useless for days, the lot of them.

Even Leonie was aware of a romantic haze enveloping her brain. Last night he’d sneaked into her dreams. And today he’d plagued her as well. Her mind made pictures of him as he’d been at Astley’s Royal Circus, the tantalizing glimpses she’d had of the openhearted boy he might have been once upon a time.

Nonetheless, she briskly led his lordship out of the workroom and into the corridor.

“We’re somewhat cramped, as you see,” she said.

“Yet what efficient use you’ve made of the quarters you have,” he said. “Given your penchant for order, I oughtn’t to be surprised. Still, it’s one thing to write numbers and such neatly in a ledger and quite another to organize a poky old building into something rather pleasant and cozy.”

Though she had her guard up, she couldn’t squelch the flutter of gratification. She and her sisters had worked hard to make the most of what they had. They hadn’t much. Their financial success was only very recent, and she knew better than to take it for granted. In the dressmaking business, failure could happen overnight, from natural catastrophes or merely the whims of fashionable women. With the Milliners’ Society, they’d proceeded cautiously, incurring no expenses they couldn’t cover with ready money.

They’d done it because of Cousin Emma, who’d given to three neglected children a real home and an education. She’d taught them how to make beautiful things and she’d saved them from the pointless, vagabond life of their parents.

And she’d died too young, with only the first taste of her own success.

Leonie thanked him calmly enough and said, “All the same, we’d prefer rather less coziness. We should like to expand into the house next door.”

“I daresay. Always room for expansion.”

By this point they’d moved out of the others’ hearing range.

“Very well, I’m stumped,” she said. “Did you merely stumble upon the place and decide to look in, or is this all part of a master plan?”

“Master plan,” he said. “Swanton charged me with finding out your charity. He wants to raise funds for you while everybody still loves him. You know how fickle the public can be, especially the female part of it.”

“He charged you,” she said.

“To be strictly accurate, I volunteered,” he said. “Eagerly. This is because I have two uses at present. One, I can watch and listen to him make poetry. Two, I can hang about him, ostensibly to shield him from poetry-maddened females, but actually to do very little and enjoy the edifying experience of being invisible to the females.”

“Despair not,” she said. “You weren’t invisible to Matron or the girls in the workroom.”

“Be that as it may, I had a good deal more fun looking into your activities,” he said.

Inside her head, a lot of panicked Leonies ran about screaming,
What? What did he find? What did he see? Why?

Outwardly, not so much as a muscle twitched, and she said, “That sounds tedious.”

“It proved far more difficult than I expected,” he said. “You and your sisters are strangely quiet about your philanthropy.”

The inner Leonie settled down and said,
Oh,
that’s
all right, then
.

She said, “It isn’t much to boast about.”

“Is it not?” He glanced back toward the room they’d left. “I’ve lived a sheltered life. Don’t think I’ve ever seen, in one room, so many girls who’ve led . . .” He paused, then closed his eyes and appeared to think. “Let us say, unsheltered lives.” He opened his eyes, the green darkening as he studied her for one unnerving moment. “You keep getting more interesting. It’s rather a trial.”

“It’s business,” she said. “Some of the girls turn out to be more talented than others. We get to pick the crème de la crème as apprentices for Maison Noirot. Too, we’ve trained and educated them ourselves, which means that we know what we’re getting. We’re not as disinterested as your duchesses and countesses and such. It isn’t pure philanthropy.”

“The fact remains, you pluck them from the streets and orphanages and workhouses.”

She smiled. “We get them cheaply that way. Often for free.”

She led him into the small shop, where the girls’ productions were on display. “If your lordship would condescend to buy a few of their trinkets, they’ll be in raptures,” she said.

She moved to a battered counter and opened a glass display case.

He stood for a moment, gazing at the collection of watch guards and pincushions and handkerchiefs and sashes and coin purses and such.

“Miss Noirot,” he said.

She looked up. He was still staring at the display case’s contents, his expression stricken.

“The girls made these things?” he said. “The girls in that classroom?”

“Yes. Remember Matron telling you that we raise funds by selling their work?”

“I remember,” he said. “But I didn’t . . .” He turned away and walked to the shop’s one small window. He folded his hands behind his back and looked out.

She was baffled. She looked down into the display case then up again at his expertly tailored back.

After what seemed a long time, he turned away from the window. He returned to the counter, wearing a small smile. “I’m moved,” he said. “Perilously near to tears. I’m very glad I came on this errand instead of Swanton. He’d be sobbing all over the place and writing fifty-stanza laments about innocence lost or abused or found or some such gobbledygook. Luckily, it’s only me, and the public is in no danger of suffering verse from this quarter.”

For a moment, she was at a loss. But logic swiftly shoved astonishment aside. He might feel something on the girls’ account or he might be feigning greatheartedness and charitable inclinations, as so many aristocrats did. Philanthropy was a duty and they performed it ostentatiously but they didn’t really care. If even half of them had truly cared, London would be a different place.

But it didn’t matter what he truly felt, she told herself. The girls mattered. And money was money, whether offered in genuine compassion or for show.

“It would seem that your friend’s poetry has infected you with excessive tenderheartedness,” she said.

“That may be so, madame, yet I wonder how any man could withstand this.” He waved his hand at the contents of the display case. “Look at them. Little hearts and flowers and curlicues and lilies of the valley and lace. Made by girls who’ve known mainly deprivation and squalor and violence.”

She considered the pincushions and watch guards and mittens and handkerchiefs. “They don’t have Botticelli paintings to look at,” she said. “If they want beauty in their lives, they have to make it.”

“Madame,” he said, “is it absolutely necessary to break my heart completely?”

She looked up into his green-gold eyes and thought how easy it would be to lose herself there. His eyes, like his low voice, seemed to promise worlds. They seemed to invite one to discover fascinating depths of character and secrets nobody else in the world knew.

She said, “Well, then, does that mean you’ll buy the lot?”

Lisburne House

Later

S
wanton gazed at the objects Lisburne had arranged on one of the library tables—after he’d cleared off the heaps of letters and the foolscap covered with poetic scribbling.

After what seemed to be a very long time, Swanton finally looked up. “Did you leave anything in the shop?”

“I found it hard to choose,” Lisburne said.

“Yet you claim I’m the one who’s always letting himself be imposed on,” Swanton said.

“Miss Noirot didn’t impose,” Lisburne said. “Like a good businesswoman, she took advantage of me during a moment of weakness.”

He wasn’t sure why he’d been weak. It wasn’t as though he’d never visited a charitable establishment before. With his father, he’d attended countless philanthropic dinners and visited asylums and orphanages and charity schools. He’d watched the inmates in their distinctive uniforms and badges standing stiffly at attention or parading for their benefactors’ inspection or singing the praises of deity or monarch or benevolent rich people.

He was used to that sort of thing. Yet he had wanted to sit down and put his face in his hands and weep for those girls and their dainty little hearts and handkerchiefs embroidered with pansies and violets and forget-me-nots.

Confound Swanton for planting him in his poetic hotbed of
feelings
!

“I suppose you didn’t realize quite how canny she is,” Swanton said.

“I did not,” Lisburne said. “She’s the very devil of a businesswoman.”

After she’d torn his heart to pieces and cleaned out the display case as well as his purse, she’d very charmingly got rid of him.

“I’m glad you weren’t there,” he told Swanton. “It might have killed you. It nearly killed me when she said, ‘They don’t have Botticelli paintings to look at. If they want beauty in their lives, they have to make it.’ ”

Swanton blinked hard, but that trick rarely worked for him. Emotion won, nine times out of ten, and this wasn’t the tenth time. His Adam’s apple went up and down and his eyes filled.

“Don’t you dare sob,” Lisburne said. “You’re turning into a complete watering pot, worse than any of those deranged girls who follow you about. Pull yourself together, man. You’re the one who proposed to raise funds for Maison Noirot’s favorite charity. I found out all about it for you. I’ve brought you abundant evidence of their work. Do you mean to compose a lugubrious sonnet on the occasion, or may we discuss practical plans?”

“Easy enough for you to talk about pulling oneself together.” Swanton pulled out his handkerchief and blew his nose. “You’re not the one who’s afraid to put a foot anywhere lest he step on a young female. I have to be careful not to hurt their tender feelings, and at the same time not say anything too kind, lest it be construed as wicked seduction.”

“Yes, yes, it’s a hellish job,” Lisburne said. “If you want to go back to Florence or Venice tomorrow, I’ll go with you happily.”

He might as well. What had he to do here but try to keep Swanton out of trouble with swooning girls? Though a grown man, supposedly capable of taking care of himself, the poet tended to be oblivious at times. This made him easy prey for any of a number of unpleasant women, like Lady Bartham’s younger daughter, Alda.

As to Miss Leonie Noirot . . .

If Lisburne did return to Italy tomorrow, would she notice he was gone, or would she simply find another fellow to intrigue while she set about picking his pockets?

Swanton took up one of the pincushions that had stabbed Lisburne to the heart.

“That’s Bridget Coppy’s work,” Lisburne said. “Miss Noirot says the heart shape is traditional for pincushions. But instead of the usual red, the girl exercised her imagination and made it in white with a coral trim, to set off the colorful flowers. The cord attaches to the waist.”

“The flowers are charming,” Swanton said. “So delicate.”

“Bridget is becoming a skilled embroiderer,” Lisburne said.

“My mother would like this,” Swanton said.

“Then by all means let us deliver it in person. I see gifts aplenty here for my mother as well. And her new husband. They would both be enchanted.”

His mother had chosen her second husband as wisely as she’d done her first. Lord Rufford was a good, generous man, who made her happy. He’d made a friend of his stepson, too, no easy feat.